


Cataclysm

by Mistress_Siana



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Cleganebowl, Gen, UnGregor, got season 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 05:37:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18888247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mistress_Siana/pseuds/Mistress_Siana
Summary: The thing that used to be Gregor Clegane recognises his brother. Cleganebowl, UnGregor’s POV.





	Cataclysm

The white fog brings peace. When he strays too far from the queen’s voice, the fog fades, becomes translucent, and behind it, the world is screaming. First is the pain, white-hot and sharp behind his temples. The pain twists and shapes the world into something nasty until every sound and every ray of sunshine is a dagger through his eyes. With the pain comes a rage that howls and burns and spares no living thing. 

He used to drink milk of the poppy for the pain; drowned a maester in molten steel and ripped the scalp off another for not bringing it to him fast enough. Memories of it flash in the back of his mind when the fog clears, and he wants none of that. He wants to obey his queen and be rewarded with nothingness. He knows, somewhere deep in his bones, that the white fog will die with her, and he’d rip the fucking dragon from the sky if needs be to protect her. No man can harm him. He knows no pain except that which comes when the fog clears. She, and it, are all that matters. The burning castle, the falling rocks, the wailing armies - he will stand in their way. 

As the man appears on the staircase, something in him stirs. His eyes follow the movement of limbs and steel and the white fog takes the rest; faces, voices, names disappear. And yet, there is something about the man that tears through the haze, turns it to gossamer. For once, he wants to allow it, to find out what it means. Flickers of memory appear, singed by that damn pain: a hearth fire, a child screaming, a child taking what’s his. Gregor’s. The name has little meaning to him now, but somewhere, in the back of his mind, behind a shred of mist and just out of reach, there’s the memory of something else he used to be. Someone else. 

“Ser Gregor,” he hears the queen say. The white fog calls to him, the pain in his skull is all-consuming and terrible, loud, bright, he wants to scream but he has no voice. No, he tells the blissful nothingness. I want to remember.

A memory is floating in: “Arise, Ser Gregor,” the silver-haired prince is saying. There’s the sound of steel scraping on steel, inaudible to everyone else but painful as a flesh wound to him, and a crowd is cheering - dreadful noise, like a thousand needles behind his eyes. He’d rip out the tongues of every man, woman and child in Harrenhal to shut them up. The man on the stairs is in the audience too, except he’s still a boy, too tall for his age, wearing his best linen and a scowl. 

Arise, Ser Gregor, says Rhaegar Targaryen. He remembers that name, the name and the dragon banner, the forever-kings of Westeros until he drenched the earth with their blood and shit. He’d smile but his face no longer knows how. 

He steps away from the queen, the maester stands in his way and dies like a fly beneath a swatter. He raises his sword out of habit, the other man doing the same, shifting flames painting his scarred face with shadows, and Gregor can see fear flare up in his eyes for just a moment. It’s an old, familiar joy. He remembers shoving his brother’s face into the coals and would laugh if he could. Sandor. He should have died back then for taking what’s his. Not just the damn toy, everything. The silence, most of all. He loved the silence in the keep before his brother came into the world to cry, laugh, snore and chase dogs. He should’ve gutted the scrap for all the noise he was making. 

The rage is also a nothingness. Like a black and red sea, it washes over the memories and breaks them apart, stories become pictures and pictures mosaics. As soon as the queen is out of his sight it comes flooding in, but for a brief, horrific, fragile moment he understands that he’s Gregor Clegane, used to be Gregor Clegane, that he’s dead and half-rotten, the shadow of a mind trapped in a cage made of flesh, held together by magic older than the world. Then the rage comes, then the pain, then the darkness that knows nothing but the thirst for blood. 


End file.
